I’ve been building a web-app call Chordin for a while now. It’s a work in progress and it has been letting me scratch an itch that I have related to programming an isomorphic app. There’s plenty of Google juice on what an isomorphic app is (in case you don’t know) and how it differs from a single-page app. The main draw for me is to be able to serve fully-formed HTML from the server for performance and SEO, while retaining the speed and flexibility of client-side application logic (paraphrased from Airbnb’s article on the topic).

To start, I decided that I wouldn’t use any tools that are already out there, tools like Meteor.js, Node.js, React, Angular, etc. Yes, I am crazy, but my main goal was to force myself to learn concepts, not rely on tools. I wanted to experiment with my own theories, even if they might fail. In the end I hoped to have a better understanding of the problems that these various tools are trying to solve. I by no means know what I’m doing, I’m definitely in way over my head, but it has been a lot of fun throughout the process.

The speed of an isomorphic app was my main concern. I knew that Chordin would be used on all devices and various internet connections and therefore it needed to be fast. As I said above, I purposely limited myself to what I could use, but I also had my own limitations as to what I knew. On the server side I decided to use PHP (it’s what I know, don’t hate), Memcached (for caching SQL queries) and ElasticSearch (for near instant song searches of large amounts of database data). This server setup gave me all the speed for the requests being made.

On the client-side of things I rolled my own Javascript to handle view loading, caching and uncaching. The code interfaces with the server and has its own layer of view caching. I was most interested in solving client-side caching as it can provide some of the best results in speeding up a user experience. Another reason is that caching on the client-side is a very complex beast, and unless I’m mistaken, Javascript frameworks don’t address this particular issue. There’s a lot of room to explore viable solutions. Most solutions that I’ve seen try to make the client → server, server → client communication as fast as possible. But in the end, there is still an exchange taking place somewhere. The logical next step in my mind is to eliminate those exchanges all together.

In subsequent posts I plan on describing in more detail the ideas that I have implemented in Chordin, as well as more conceptual ideas I hope to implement. Stay tuned for more!

In this 3rd installment of illustrations (see also Ernst Haeckel and John James Audubon) I bring you over 100 year old mechanical illustrations of valve gears, steam engines and boilers. These illustrations come from a 1908 I.C.S Reference Library book, Valve Gears, Steam Engine Design, Steam Boiler Design. I picked this particular book up from Shop Goodwill for a decent price.

It hurt me to scan this book as I had to open and push it down on the scanner to get the best scan. I could hear the brittle binding screaming in pain, but I managed to get 178 illustrations scanned from the book and made them available for you to download for free. I did a bit of minimal processing of the scans like cropping, sharpening and brightening, but other than that, they are as is from the book.

I hope you enjoy these illustrations and if you happen to use them, please give me some link love.

I’ve been slowly building up a collection of ultra hi-res images that would work really well for printing. I initially got inspired when I ran across the Ernst Haeckel prints. My goal is to decorate my office (whenever that gets completed) with prints. It was to my amazement and joy that I ran across the new Audubon website. They have made all of John James Audubon’s Birds of North America watercolor illustrations available as free hi-res downloads. It’s definitely worth your while to look through them all. If you’re looking to download all the images, made your life easy by making all 435 images available on Dropbox.

In case you missed it last night, I finally launched the beginnings of something that I hope becomes much bigger and eventually revolutionary. At the offset, Chordin is just a simple web-app that lets you search for guitar chords by song, album or artist on any device.

For the short-term, I plan on integrating favorites and playlists, allowing me to scratch an itch I’ve had with managing all the guitar music that I play.

In the long-term, I hope to bring a new, open standard for how guitar tablature is written. You might wonder why a new format is even needed, but take a look at any tablature site and you’ll see that we’ve been stuck with monospace fonts for as long as anyone can remember. There needs to be change and I have a scheme for that change.

I have a vintage Pentax Spotmatic F that I inherited from my grandfather. When I first got it the batter for the light meter was working correctly. This is pretty surprising since the battery was an original PX625 mercury battery. After a good year or two of usage, it died on me. I did some preliminary searches on the internet and found this Wein MRB625 Cell replacement battery on B&H. Unfortunately, when it came in the mail it didn’t work. Google let me know pretty quick that this is common with these types of zinc-air batteries. I had a choice, I could buy more batteries and hope that they hadn’t died, or I could find a different solution.

Google was my friend again. I found someone who had mentioned buying an adapter that would convert the voltage of a common button battery to the voltage needed for the light meter. I was a bit skeptical since the adapter was created and sold in Thailand, but the person claimed that it was worth the price and worked well.

I decided to take the risk, bought the adapter and have had light meter success! The adapter that I purchased converts a normal Energizer 386/301 Silver Oxide (1.55V) button battery to the voltage of the MR-9 PX625 PX13 Mercury battery (1.35V). You can get the adapter on Amazon for about $30 and it arrives in around 2 weeks. I suppose the ultimate proof is in how accurately the light meter itself is registering. I’ll find that out after I get my first roll of film developed.

I take photos to remember. Life speeds up with alacrity, yet my memory does not. The photographic moments of the past that seemed so insignificant and trivial become the key that unlocks memories of the past. A plate of food, a sunrise, a smile, are all piled deep with layers of surrounding memories that I never want to forget.

I take photos to forget. Regret and mistakes plague my life and seem to be etched in my memory permanently. The moments that a photo captures are capable of erasing those failures and replacing them with times I forget to remember.